THE WORLD

THE WORLD;Assassins Usually Miss the Larger Target

By ELAINE SCIOLINO

Published: November 12, 1995

WASHINGTON—
FROM the moment Yigal Amir fired his pistol, killing Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, the question in the minds of many was what impact the Israeli leader's death would have on Middle East peace.

Mr. Amir's own words could not have been clearer: He had said months earlier that he was determined to stop Israel from turning over control of much of the West Bank, what he called Israel's "most holy land," to the Palestinians. What is not clear -- at least not yet -- is whether he will succeed in stopping, or even slowing down, implementation of the peace agreement between Israelis and Palestinians.

But if Mr. Amir had more of a sense of history, he would know that assassination for political ends works only seldom -- and hardly ever in the way the assassin intended. The individual murderer simply does not have the kind of force on the historical stage that the leader of a popular revolution or the commander of an army might. And the heinousness of the crime itself often discredits the assassin's cause.

"Great political changes do not take place as a result of specific personal interventions," said Franklin Ford, the Harvard University historian who investigated assassination throughout history in his book, "Political Murder." "Whatever happens -- aside from self-assertion -- the outcome is not going to be what the assassin had in mind. The historical record seems to me pretty impressive that people who killed other people for political advantage were almost always disappointed."

Not every attempt at assassination is political. Acts of violence can spring from personal passions that have no connection to the specific target or larger political events. Giuseppe Zangara, a 32-year-old Italian immigrant bricklayer espoused no real cause, except perhaps personal outrage against capitalism, when he opened fire on President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt at a political rally in Miami in 1933. In confessing, he explained that his father, the President-elect and rich people in general were to blame for the constant stomach pain he had endured since childhood.

One can argue that the political assassin achieves the most fundamental goal simply by removing his or her target from political life. Sirhan Sirhan, whose family had to flee Jerusalem in poverty after Israeli independence, deeply hated Robert Kennedy for his allegiance to Israel. "His intent was to deny the Presidency to a powerful pro-Israeli politician on the brink of the nomination," wrote James W. Clarke, professor of political science at the University of Arizona in his 1982 book "American Assassins." But Mr. Kennedy's death did nothing to halt the deepening of U.S.-Israeli ties; Richard Nixon opened up the Pentagon's storehouses and airlifted American military equipment to Israel in the 1973 war.

In the vast majority of political assassinations, the murderer's goal is not achieved. Julius Caesar's killers (Brutus, too) sought to destroy an ambitious general -- and helped destroy the Roman republic. Henry II ordered the death of Archbishop Thomas a Becket to end his problems with the clergy, but was forced instead to do penance at Becket's tomb on the Pope's orders.

John Wilkes Booth was driven by his love of the Confederacy and his hatred of Abraham Lincoln to kill the President. But by the time he acted, the South had lost the war. He couldn't fathom why he wasn't lionized. "A country that groaned beneath this tyranny, and prayed for this end, and yet now behold the cold hand they extend me," he wrote in his diary before his capture.

Lincoln's death only made it worse for white Confederates. Without him, Northern Republicans brought vengeance down on the South with a ferocity that was alien to Lincoln, putting it under military rule. But in the end, John Wilkes Booth may have gotten his revenge, in the ultimate failure of Reconstruction.

Not every assassin's motive is clear, not every outcome easy to interpret. James Earl Ray, the petty thief who killed Martin Luther King Jr., was probably motivated more by money than by obsessive racist rage when he shot and killed the civil rights leader in 1968. Just as Dr. King's death helped derail the reconciliatory tone of the civil rights movement, it also spurred a sense of outrage that lent credibility to more militant black movements.

A Side Effect: World War I

One safe conclusion is that assassinations often have unintended consequences. The Bosnian Serb Gavrilo Princip's assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand, the heir to the Austrian throne, in Sarajevo in 1914 may have helped end Austrian domination of the Balkans, but only at the cost of setting off World War I and then tying the Serbs' future for 75 years to the same Croats and Bosnian Muslims they fight today. Likewise, the assassination of John F. Kennedy gave Lyndon Johnson much more room to push through an aggressive domestic social agenda than Mr. Kennedy may ever have had.

There is at least one case in which the would-be assassin achieved his political goal -- but only because his victim did not die. France's Emperor Napoleon III was just grazed by a fragment of a grenade thrown at his carriage in Paris in 1858 by Felice Orsini, an ardent Italian nationalist. But the Emperor felt so guilty that he had abandoned the pro-Italian sentiments of his youth that he led France into battle against Austria the next year, a war that resulted in the creation of the Kingdom of Italy in 1861.

So what effect will Mr. Amir's action have on the course of Middle East history? Certainly he is not the first to try to prevent Arabs from making peace with Israel

King Abdullah of Jordan was assassinated while entering Al Aksa mosque in Jerusalem in 1951 by a Palestinian who feared Abdullah might make peace with the new state of Israel, with whose leaders he had conducted secret talks. His death may have slowed but did not destroy the process. Abdullah's 16-year-old grandson, Hussein, escaped injury, was crowned king and went on to meet secretly with Israeli leaders before making peace four decades later.

President Anwar el-Sadat of Egypt was gunned down while reviewing a military parade in Cairo in 1981 by anti-American Islamists after he made peace with Israel at Camp David. But Egypt is still at peace with Israel, is still the recipient of more than $2 billion a year in American aid, is still autocratic -- and still largely excludes the Islamic opposition from power.

At Mr. Rabin's funeral last week, both King Hussein and Mr. Mubarak pledged to continue the Israeli's quest for peace.

And thus the first unintended consequences of Mr. Rabin's murder: Certainly Mr. Amir could not have meant to bring King Hussein back to Jerusalem for the first time since his defeat at the hands of Yitzhak Rabin's army in the 1967 war, or to bring Mr. Mubarak to Jerusalem for the first time in the 14 years he has been Egypt's leader. And three days after the funeral, Yasir Arafat made his first known visit to Israel, where he paid respects to Mr. Rabin's widow over coffee at her home in Tel Aviv.